Talk:Superconducting Super Collider
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I don't think we should be citing the Cato Inst. as a unbiased source for this article. Esp. on a government project that was shutdown due to budgetary concerns. Find a more neutral source - not an anti-government spending libertarian think tank. - Ben
what does it do? or, what would it have done had it not shut down. is it an energy source? what the flip is it?
- It is a particle accelerator. They generally work to make it so that particles (i.e. atoms, isotopes, molecules, etc.) can be accelerated to great speeds, and often run into each other, and things like that. It would have let them do certain types of scientific experiments, nothing more, nothing less. It would probably have consumed a huge amount of power and would have produced likely none at all.
- Seem pointless? The reason the federal government funds this sort of work at all (though it didn't in this case) was because such seemingly pointless devices (beginning with the cyclotron) resulted in some fairly practical things... (And no, it's probably not a coincidence that the SSC was scrapped just after the end of the Cold War) --Fastfission 01:18, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
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- To add to what Fastfission said, it's contribution to theoretical physics would have been to either support a grand unification theory based on the existence of a Higgs boson, or to provide data upon which to modify the theory (the buzzword was "new science"). Other accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were not originally believed capable of testing for the Higgs, but high-energy physicists have changed their minds, arguably by lowering their standards.
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- The LHC's Wikipedia article, for the most part, explains what a dumbed-down version of the SSC does. Colliders like these are often compared to extremely-high-powered microscopes capable of "looking" deep inside atoms where no other microscopes can "see." If these colliders are like microscopes, then their GeV or TeV ratings (with "light particles") could be said to be like "magnification" factors. The LHC can do 14 TeV, whereas the SSC would have done 40 TeV. The LHC hopes to improve its TeV rating by using "heavy particles", which could generate up to 1150 TeV, but how useful such collisions would be in finding the Higgs is a matter of debate.
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- The practical benefits of the primary scientific mission of the SSC amounted to a gamble. Every similar project had established scientific principles that had paid off in many ways-- some purely academic that only physicists cared about, some we use every day, like nuclear energy. However, no one could guarantee that the SSC would find anything useful as a result of its main mission-- it could have been a panacea of science, or it could have showed us no more than we already knew, or something we couldn't find a way to use for any practical purpose.
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- As a result of the unpredictability of the SSC's exploratory science, proponents tended to talk in terms of the more tangible, and more certain, indirect benefits of the various technologies that were being engineered to help build and operate the SSC. The defense department was keenly interested in how to contain and control intense particle beams and matter/antimatter collisions. The Department of Energy was interested in how it was producing and consuming energy. Waste radiation was being piped to a cancer treatment facility. Research into its superconducting electromagnets (used in containing and controlling the beam) led to advances in mass transit by train and by sea, particularly in Japan. One of the more humorous possibilities was for a cure to male pattern baldness. Such odd claims may have contributed to the project's failure to be taken seriously by many Washington politicians.
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- I'm rattling this off from memory so don't move these numbers to the main article without checking them-- but if I recall, the initial cost was projected at $8 billion. In the initial pitch to Congress, scientists were hopeful of getting other nations, particularly Japan, to help fund up to half of the project. About $3 billion into the project, the cost projection was raised to $11 billion, and Japan decided to withdraw its grants to cover losses from building a portion of the international space station (a large portion which could no longer be used after Congress forced NASA to redesign a smaller station on a smaller budget). With budget overruns and foreign money drying up during an election year, Congress voted to spend $2 billion to mothball the SSC, then agreed to give the scientists one year to raise matching funds, which they failed to do. I belive cleanup also ran over budget to about $4 billion.
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- After the election, Congress voted to spend about $40 billion bailing out Russia and $20 billion bailing out the Mexican economy. Some recently unemployed (and soon to be unemployed) physicists complained that if Russia and Mexico could do with slightly less U.S. taxpayer money, we could finish the SSC "right here in America" and keep "the most highly educated workforce in the world" from fleeing to CERN. Political opponents accused these physicists and politicians of being excessively patriotic and out of touch.
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- Political opposition to the SSC came primarily from uneducated incumbents who discussed the SSC only as if it were nothing more than a big pork barrel project for Texas, They asserted most voters would not understand any benefit gained from the SSC, so it became an easy target for those wanting to make a grand gesture of "fiscal responsibility" (never mind the real pork-barrel projects in their own states). Some pundits believed Texas was targeted for the gesture because angering that state would have the least negative impact on the election for Democrats, who had a comfortable majority in both houses at the time; who did not expect to gain any seats or electoral votes from Texas; and who were fighting a "tax-and-spend" perception among voters in some hotly contested elections.
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- As a result of the political debate, many scientists adjusted their opinion of the SSC after it was canned. Some on the political right who initially opposed the SSC as too risky and wasteful later bemoaned the short-sightedness of the left in matters of important science. Some on the left had originally championed the fight for the progress of "the most important scientific laboratory of all time," "the cathedrals of science," but would later attempt to marginalize the project as if it would not have served as much of a practical purpose, as, say, SETI or the study of the mating rituals of the wooly mammoth. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Its results were a gamble from the beginning-- worth risking $8 billion, but maybe not $16 billion.
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- What is the most important legacy of the SSC? Most of the physicists continue their work elsewhere, but no grand unification theory or string theory has been proven, and the Higgs remains elusive. However, one of the more interesting footnotes to history is that the SSC led directly to the creation of the World Wide Web (well, more directly than Al Gore). SSC physicists who needed to collaborate with CERN physicists wanted access over the Internet to the CERN phone database, for which Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and HTML. Some SSC physicists in Dallas were among the first to access the first Web server (the CERN phone book) using some customizations to Apple's HyperCard, as well as by coding some of the first standalone Web browsers. Use of SSC's HyperCard scripts to access the CERN phone book in Summer 1992 was followed by the transmission of full HyperCard stacks over HTTP, which is considered by some to be the first use of the Web to serve and retrieve graphics, scripts, forms, and GUI elements. However, the HyperCard stacks and cards were encoded in a custom SGML language called GUIML instead of HTML; used the HyperTalk scripting language instead of JavaScript; and sent images by compressing something called a "resource fork" rather than as a typical image format. About 6 months later, NCSA's Marc Andreessen built Mosaic. Strange, but true.
[edit] Improvements coming
After I finish my history of physics paper on the SCC, I'll pimp this article. savidan(talk) (e@) 07:02, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
